cojo

Oli (Oliver? Not sure which you prefer, which I realize now I should have asked a long time ago in our first call) -

Just wanted to reiterate that I really appreciate what you have done with both OpenRegulatory and Formwork, as it was a big unlock for one of the companies I helped a few years ago as we navigated our way into the QMS / FDA / med. reg. world.

While reading this as a many-times-over-founder myself, I deeply felt multiple emotions which this would bring upon me if I were in your shoes after all the work I know you’ve put in.

I hope you are able to navigate this to a happy / successful outcome for yourself and any others involved for the relevant compan(y/ies)!

I am grateful for what you have contributed over the years on the software and documentation fronts with OpenRegulatory and Formwork both.

Cannot emphasize this enough. I think one of my best purchases in the past year or two was investing in the MFC-L3780CDW Brother laser printer.

Took some research and timing but couldn’t be happier with no longer having to worry about ink clogging / going bad if I haven’t printed for a while.

Toner cartridges aren’t exactly cheap, but they will print a ton of pages, and they take way longer to go bad from what I’ve experienced so far…

Wow, seeing this made me surprisingly emotional as I realized that downloading the pre-release leaked source code for some testing levels of HL2 (which included an early version of what would become Steam, as well)

- and then debugging / figuring out how to hack together a version that would compile in Visual Studio (back when you had to have a license… in theory…) as a preteen -

had a way bigger impact on me than I gave it credit for at the time. I think seeing the sheer scope of that codebase and realizing how much I didn’t understand and still had to learn is part of what put me in my path into both the game industry and software startups. I found both Valve’s and Gabe’s stories that much more compelling after gaining an appreciation for how much there was under the hood.

Cheers to everyone who has worked on this engine, this project, and this company over the years. I suspect your influence runs deeper than you know.

Good point! I hadn’t looked at how resale value holds up. Maybe I will do that after all… thanks for the suggestion!

I was quite surprised by this discrepancy as well (my new iPhone has 7, but the new MBP does not).

I had just assumed that for sure this would be the year I upgrade my M1 Max MBP to an M4 Max. I will not be doing so knowing that it lacks WiFi 7; as one of the child comments notes, I count on getting a solid 3 years out of my machine, so future-proofing carries some value (and I already have WiFi7 access points), and I download terabytes of data in some weeks for the work I do, and not having to Ethernet in at a fixed desk to do so efficiently will be a big enough win that I will wait another year before shelling out $6k “off-cycle”.

Big bummer for me. I was looking forward to performance gains next Friday.

This is really exciting to see for me personally.

I've been pushing over the past six months or so for multiple clients, from healthcare companies with basic mobile apps to deep gaming companies / products, to adopt Rive over Lottie and other past solutions, as I think it's finally hit its stride and is "ready-for-adoption".

This was the last piece that came up in some of those discussions as a potential concern (latest renderer being "closed source" / not quite final).

Really excited to see this problem space continue to improve thanks to this decision and the work the Rive team is doing in general (drop shadows, blur, etc. are all going to be very exciting as they ship)!

It hadn't occurred to me that even a photo with the lens cap on still contains decent entropy, although it now seems somewhat obvious to me in hindsight after thinking about it.

I really enjoyed how this article covered a variety of different "hacker-spirit" things; real-world entropy into "digital-world" meaningful use cases, plus a whole extra "one more thing" timelock encryption example at the end.

As someone who uses Cloudflare Workers / Pages heavily these days whenever I can, it's quite fun to see both "how the sausage is made" as well as the culture (playfulness?) behind it. Kinda makes me want to go visit the Austin office since I'm local.

Kudos and thanks to the Cloudflare team for writing stuff like this up! One of the more enjoyable tech pieces I've read in the past couple of weeks, and I learned multiple things along the way.

I think yours is a fair opinion as well, to be clear - I actually debated editing him out for a couple of minutes after I first posted, because I do know that his background was truly heavy on the gamedev side of things early in his career.

I have my reasons for thinking things changed later on, but they are subjective / personal opinion based on personal experience, so I respect anyone who would disagree and exclude him from a list like this.

This is helpful context as well, in addition to doomlaser's explanation of his background re: IBM and Red Hat. Thanks for sharing it.

I wonder to what extent Silver Lake drove this overall decision (vs. others on the board potentially initiating it)

I agree!

I posted before that comment, which was definitely helpful - that context (and some other helpful replies here and elsewhere in the overall thread) have changed my assessment as well.

I agree - this may be unclear phrasing on my part.

What I meant in my original comment was, "wow, this seems like a hire that is only focused on finding someone with lots of experience managing, and not at all on the gaming industry / customer goodwill".

So I think you're right - and I also think this shows how I misjudged how I originally thought a scenario like this would have played out.

Agreed - the reaffirmation of guidance almost felt to me like a "seriously guys, why are we down 22% up front, you know this doesn't impact short-term revenue..." which... definitely misses the point.

It's interesting that after-hours / future trading doesn't seem to have responded positively (yet). Maybe that's just another symptom of lost trust as well.

Yeah, I think this could definitely be one explanation.

Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going."

And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.

I have to say, the only thing more surprising to me than seeing the board actually hold Riccitiello responsible for this (with consequences) is seeing that their interim replacement / transitional CEO is someone with a pedigree that, on the surface, seems even more management consulting / investor / revenue focused than Riccitiello was himself.

To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.).

But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration.

So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus.

I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast.